8 Creation Compromises

8 Creation compromises

With the growth & acceptance of evolution in the 19th century the church was feeling at odds with the new ‘facts’ of science. Church leaders felt the need to marry the bible account of history with the claims of evolutionary scientists.

1 The Gap Theory.

The first reinterpretation of accepted creation doctrine was with the Gap Theory, proposed by Thomas Chalmers. Here a vast period of time was inferred inbetween Gen 1:1 & Gen 1:2. The theory claims that an initial creation occurred billions of years ago where long geological ages went by on Earth, life started & developed during this period. This was ended by Lucifer’s flood. There was then a recreation of the world to that we now live in.

If you look at the footnote to Gen 1:2 (eg. NIV) it states that the verse could read, ‘The Earth ‘became’ formless & void instead of ‘was’, this claimed that an initial creation was erased & the world that we now know was formed.

Acceptance of this theory came from the Schofield bible with its translation of Gen 1 & footnote supporting the theory.

2. Theistic evolution.

This idea is basically a full acceptance of old age history, but says that God used evolution to produce the present Earth. Evolutionists have such problems in explaining the origin of life, the development of species & how genetic information can be produced by random processes. Here formation & changes are attributed to God.

3. Progressive Creation.

This idea is actively being promoted in theU.S.by Hugh Ross. It is said that God progressively created through long periods of time. This scenario appears much like the theistic evolution model. The universe appeared with a Big Bang, some 15 billon years ago. God is supposed to have formed the planets & stars, Life on Earth was progressively introduced through time. The missing links in the fossil record are indeed lacking since God created new creatures complete.

4 Day Age theory.

Here the ‘days’ in Genesis 1 are not actual 24 hours periods of creation, but rather days in which God explained the creation process to Moses. Creation is supposed to have taken billions of years & the account in Genesis is basically a summary of what God did rather than a historical record.

Problems with all of these models:

1 They all challenge the clear teaching of creation in Genesis 1, there is no way that any of these have been
derived from scripture alone. If true it would mean that all bible believers up to the scientific age would have been deceived into thinking that creation occurred in 6 days.

2 The Lord Jesus said that man was made in the beginning (Mt 19:4-5). If the Earth is billions of years old & man only appeared ~1 million years ago then this challenges scripture & God.

3 1Cor 15:21-22 says death came into the world by Adam’s sin. If life had been living & dying for billions of years this is nonsense.

4 In Gen 1:31 God says that his creation was very good. If death & suffering has existed for millions of years this makes a mockery of this statement.

The basic issue here is whether you believe God who knows everything or want to follow the ideas of fallible man. This is the situation today and was described 2000 years ago in Pet 3:3-5 (KJV) where it says that, ‘in the end days scoffers will come … they are willingly ignorant’.

The scientific evidence supporting God’s special creation in 6 days is overwhelming, but is rejected because people don’t want to be responsible to God.

Stephen Martin